SCO Extorting Unixware Licenses to Linux Users?

from the but-i-don't-want-unixware dept.

An anonymous user noted that SCO will
sell you Unixware
if you want to "Legitimize" your usage of Linux at your company. If you buy the
license, you will be held blameless for your transgressions against SCO! Pricing
has yet to be determined for the special licenses, but I suspect that for any value
greater than zero, there are going to be a fair number of angry users.

Whatever Happened to Micropayments?

from the are-we-there-yet dept.

prostoalex writes "Remember
Flooz? Or
Beenz?
With a few notable successes (PayPal, and
that's about it) online micropayment industry is saving its success stories for
future generations. New York Times reports about
two nascent micropayment systems, one coming out of Stanford, one out of
MIT, that are supposed to help the content producers and Internet users to
engage in less-than-a-dollar financial transactions without huge overhead
costs, so typical of credit card payments.
BitPass requires you to purchase a virtual debit card with a certain amount
on it to pay for products and services, and
PepperCoin consolidates numerous micropayments into one bill that is then
split between the content providers that managed to sell their product to the
Internet user." I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize
the net.

Do It Yourself CD Changer

from the surprisingly-elegant dept.

SuperDuG writes "This is a true
homebrew solution to saving a few bucks
when it comes
to cd changers. And to make it even better the whole setup is
controlled by none other than linux. Seems like a nice setup to do batch
burns without user interaction. Source is provided if you wanted to build
your own." Not sure if this is very practical, or even if it would be
cheaper than buying a changer, but it sure looks cool.

from the giveth-and-taketh-away dept.

An anonymous reader submits: "SCO may now have filed for UNIX copyrights and
made various allegations about code-copying, but the actual complaint against
IBM still seems to be focused around allegations UNIX-based enterprise
technologies (such as RCU, JFS and SMP) being improperly added to Linux.
Yet, reviewing the Linux kernel archives reveals some interesting and surprising
background on just who helped put these technologies into Linux. PJ's GROKLAW
blog has uncovered that '
Caldera Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor,' including what looks like
a lot
of work on the early stages of JFS. The same employee's name also crops
up when we look at RCU. When
IBM posts RCU improvements, did he complain? No,
he requests further improvements even helpfully providing a link to
inspire the IBMer!"

from the lobbying-for-inclusion dept.

suso asks: "I've been working on a set of
programs called num-utils
that I would eventually like to be considered for inclusion in some of
the many free Un*x distributions (on the install CDs, etc). So my question
is, how does one put their applications on the track to be included in the
main distribution of Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, *BSD, and so on? Is this just
something that is up to the maintainers or are there submission forms of some
kind?"

MIT Students' Audiopad Mixes Electronic Music

from the cool-videos dept.

nicodemus05 writes "Grad students at
MIT's Media Lab have come up with an
innovative control device called the
Audiopad to run
their digital music studio. The Audiopad, '...is a composition and performance
instrument for electronic music which tracks the positions of objects on a
tabletop surface and converts their motion into music.' It's practical, but
more importantly it looks really, really cool."

Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source

from the don't-worry-they'll-print-more-money dept.

caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian
Federal Government into adopting open source software. As
this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice
in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much
money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to
force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft
receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer
knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions
about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be
introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source
solutions (you may remember
this story
about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes
from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a
profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government
to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party
criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech
affirmative action.""

from the pick-any-two dept.

Above writes "Many recent stories have been about the problems
of inkjet Printers. Seems they all want to sell the printer for cheap, and then
use the ink to make up the difference. There are also problems where a lack of
printing, or printing too much, could make it much more expensive to use your
inkjet. So, since mine just died, what are the best options? I'm intersted in
two catagories, a 'personal' color printer, probably USB to a machine, and a
'workgroup' color printer, with ethernet, postscript prefered. While Windows
is good for my application, something that plays well with FreeBSD and Linux
would be a major win as well. I'd consider laser if it's cheap enough (read
$500/printer), and I don't think that it is. I'm willing to pay a bit more for
the printer if that means bigger ink tanks, better cleaning, and easier to buy
replacement supplies, the question is, are there really good options out there
or have the low-end 'throwaway' printers taken over the market?" One option is
a modded inkjet like the ones here,
liberated from tiny ink cartridges. Any recommendations out there for decent
color lasers?

DVD Player With DVI Output

from the firewire-would-be-nice-too dept.

ffierling writes "Why are there no big name DVD Players with digital video outputs?
With all the available digital displays (LCD, plasma, DLP, etc) and the obvious
benefits of an all-digital connection, it's easy to conclude the threat of litigation
from copyright holders is holding up the big name manufacturers. So how is it
V Inc. can sell their
Bravo D1 DVD Player with
DVI output? Are they below the MPAA's radar, or just quicker to market?"